Electronic Business (“e-business”) is an increasingly common form of conducting commercial transactions. Numerous organizations provide web-sites that enable clients to perform a wide variety of commercial transactions over the Internet. E-business applications range from on-line retail shops, through on-line libraries, information services and financial services to various business-to-business applications.
The design, implementation and management of web services such as e-business applications typically involve workload analysis and capacity planning. For example, a family of performance management and capacity planning products for enterprise information technology (IT) applications called HyPerformix™ is offered by HyPerformix, Inc. (Austin, Tex.). Details regarding this product family are available at www.hyperformix.com.
Menascé and Almeida provide performance and availability predictive models for managing and planning the capacity of web services in “Capacity Planning for Web Services,” Prentice Hall PTR, 2002, which is incorporated herein by reference. In particular, chapter 5, pages 175-204, describes capacity planning models. Chapter 6, pages 205-260, describes methods for characterization and analysis of the workload in web services.
Specifically concerning the e-business domain, Menascé and Almeida describe methods for analyzing and modeling of client behavior in e-business systems in “Scaling for E-Business,” Prentice Hall PTR, 2000, chapter 2, pages 41-66, which is incorporated herein by reference. Methods for characterizing the workload in e-business systems are described in chapter 11, pages 325-354.